This scene looks effortless. I doubt if anyone could guess that it took Len Rossiter several rehearsals, and then patient persuasion in the studio, to get his props sorted and the shots to make sense for the comedy to work – the staff behaved as if he were being difficult. To get the coins to spill from each pocket, as seen, he asked for a large match box on a pivot in one pocket and for the pocket bottom to be loosely tacked in the other. Also, the compo studio floor rendered the falling coins soundless, so Len pushed for us to end on a bit of plywood. The director shot the scene in close-up at first. Len politely suggested that it was a better build-up to see him jiggling his pants’ pockets. In the end, we did it in a single take.
You can find a detailed account of how Len Rossiter worked in my book Are You Going to do That Little Jump? – The Adventure Continues.
